GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmers’ market. You also won’t find any elaborately processed food products, any packages with long lists of unpronounceable ingredients or dubious health claims, nothing microwavable, and, perhaps best of all, no old food from far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of their taste and nutritional quality-precisely the kind your great grandmother, or even your Neolithic ancestors, would easily have recognized as food.
Indeed, the surest way to escape the Western diet is simply to depart the realms it rules: the supermarket, the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet. It is hard to eat badly from the farmers’ market, from a CSA box (community-supported agriculture, an increasingly popular scheme in which you subscribe to a farm and receive a weekly box of produce), or from your garden. The number of farmers’ markets has more than doubled in the last ten years, to more than four thousand, making it one of the fastest-growing segments of the food marketplace. It is true that most farmers’ markets operate only seasonally, and you won’t find everything you need there. But buying as much as you can from the farmers’ market, or directly from the farm when that’s an option, is a simple act with a host of profound consequences for your health as well as for the health of the food chain you’ve now joined.
When you eat from the farmers’ market, you automatically eat food that is in season, which is usually when it is most nutritious. Eating in season also tends to diversify your diet-because you can’t buy strawberries or broccoli or potatoes twelve months of the year, you’ll find yourself experimenting with other foods when they come into the market. The CSA box does an even better job of forcing you out of your dietary rut because you’ll find things in your weekly allotment that you would never buy on your own. Whether it’s a rutabaga or an unfamiliar winter squash, the CSA box’s contents invariably send you to your cookbooks to figure out what in the world to do with them. Cooking is one of the most important health consequences of buying food from local farmers; for one thing, when you cook at home you seldom find yourself reaching for the ethoxylated diglycerides or high-fructose corn syrup. But more on cooking later.
To shop at a farmers’ market or sign up with a CSA is to join a short food chain and that has several implications for your health. Local produce is typically picked ripe and is fresher than supermarket produce, and for those reasons it should be tastier and more nutritious. As for supermarket organic produce, it too is likely to have come from far away-from the industrial organic farms of California or, increasingly, China.* And while it’s true that the organic label guarantees that no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers have been used to produce the food, many, if not most, of the small farms that supply farmers’ markets are organic in everything but name. To survive in the farmers’ market or CSA economy, a farm will need to be highly diversified, and a diversified farm usually has little need for pesticides; it’s the big monocultures that can’t survive without them.†
If you’re concerned about chemicals in your produce, you can simply ask the farmer at the market how he or she deals with pests and fertility and begin the sort of conversation between producers and consumers that, in the end, is the best guarantee of quality in your food. So many of the problems of the industrial food chain stem from its length and complexity. A wall of ignorance intervenes between consumers and producers, and that wall fosters a certain carelessness on both sides. Farmers can lose sight of the fact that they’re growing food for actual eaters rather than for middlemen, and consumers can easily forget that growing good food takes care and hard work. In a long food chain, the story and identity of the food (Who grew it? Where and how was it grown?) disappear into the undifferentiated stream of commodities, so that the only information communicated between consumers and producers is a price. In a short food chain, eaters can make their needs and desires known to the farmer, and farmers can impress on eaters the distinctions between ordinary and exceptional food, and the many reasons why exceptional food is worth what it costs. Food reclaims its story, and some of its nobility, when the person who grew it hands it to you. So here’s a subclause to the get-out-of-the-supermarket rule: Shake the hand that feeds you.
As soon as you do, accountability becomes once again a matter of relationships instead of regulation or labeling or legal liability. Food safety didn’t become a national or global problem until the industrialization of the food chain attenuated the relationships between food producers and eaters. That was the story Upton Sinclair told about the Beef Trust in 1906, and it’s the story unfolding in China today, where the rapid industrialization of the food system is leading to alarming breakdowns in food safety and integrity. Regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa. Only when we participate in a short food chain are we reminded every week that we are indeed part of a food chain and dependent for our health on its peoples and soils and integrity-on its health.
“Eating is an agricultural act,” Wendell Berry famously wrote, by which he meant that we are not just passive consumers of food but cocreators of the systems that feed us. Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and “value” or they can nourish a food chain organized around values-values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote-a vote for health in the largest sense-food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.
THREE - MOSTLY PLANTS: WHAT TO EAT
I f you can manage to just eat food most of the time, whatever that food is, you’ll probably be okay. One lesson that can be drawn from the striking diversity of traditional diets that people have lived on around the world is that it is possible to nourish ourselves from an astonishing range of different foods, so long as they are foods. There have been, and can be, healthy high-fat and healthy low-fat diets, so long as they’re built around whole foods rather than highly processed food products. Yet there are some whole foods that are better than others, and some ways of producing them and then combining them in meals that are worth attending to. So this section proposes a handful of personal policies regarding what to eat, above and beyond “food.”
EAT MOSTLY PLANTS, ESPECIALLY LEAVES. Scientists may disagree about what’s so good about eating plants-Is it the antioxidants in them? The fiber? The o
mega-3 fatty acids?-but they do agree that plants are probably really good for you, and certainly can’t hurt. In all my interviews with nutrition experts, the benefits of a plant-based diet provided the only point of universal consensus. Even nutrition scientists who have been chastened by decades of conflict and confusion about dietary advice would answer my question “So what are you still sure of?” with some variation on the recommendation to “eat more plants.” (Though Marion Nestle was slightly more circumspect: “Certainly eating plants isn’t harmful.”)
That plants are good for humans to eat probably doesn’t need much elaboration, but the story of vitamin C, an antioxidant we depend primarily on plants to supply us, points to the evolutionary reasons why this might have become the case. Way back in evolution, our ancestors possessed the biological ability to make vitamin C, an essential nutrient, from scratch. Like other antioxidants, vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, contributes to our health in at least two important ways. Several of the body’s routine processes, including cell metabolism and the defense mechanism of inflammation, produce “oxygen radicals”-atoms of oxygen with an extra unpaired electron that make them particularly eager to react with other molecules in ways that can create all kinds of trouble. Free radicals have been implicated in a great many health problems, including cancer and the various problems associated with aging. (Free-radical production rises as you get older.) Antioxidants like vitamin C harmlessly absorb and stabilize these radicals before they can do their mischief.
But antioxidants do something else for us as well: They stimulate the liver to produce the enzymes necessary to break down the antioxidant itself, enzymes that, once produced, go on to break down other compounds as well, including whatever toxins happen to resemble the antioxidant. In this way antioxidants help detoxify dangerous chemicals, including carcinogens, and the more kinds of antioxidants in the diet, the more kinds of toxins the body can disarm. This is one reason why it’s important to eat as many different kinds of plants as possible: They all have different antioxidants and so help the body eliminate different kinds of toxins. (It stands to reason that the more toxins there are in the environment, the more plants you should be eating.)
Animals can synthesize some of their own antioxidants, including, once upon a time, vitamin C. But there was so much vitamin C in our ancestors’ plant-rich diet that over time we lost our ability to make the compound ourselves, perhaps because natural selection tends to dispense with anything superfluous that is metabolically expensive to produce. (The reason plants are such a rich source of antioxidants is that they need them to cope with all the pure oxygen produced during photosynthesis.) This was a happy development for the plants, of course, because it made humans utterly dependent upon them for an essential nutrient-which is why humans have been doing so much for the vitamin C producers ever since, spreading their genes and expanding their habitat. We sometimes think of sweetness as the linchpin of the reciprocal relationship between plants and people, but antioxidants like vitamin C play an equally important, if less perceptible, part.
So our biological dependence on plants goes back and runs deep, which makes it not at all surprising that eating them should be so good for us. There are literally scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases. In countries where people eat a pound or more of fruits and vegetables a day, the rate of cancer is half what it is in the United States. We also know that vegetarians are less susceptible to most of the Western diseases, and as a consequence live longer than the rest of us. (Though near vegetarians-so-called flexitarians-are just as healthy as vegetarians.) Exactly why this should be so is not quite as clear as the fact that it is. The antioxidants in plants almost certainly are protective, but so may be the omega-3s (also essential nutrients that we can’t produce ourselves) and the fiber and still other plant components and synergies as yet unrecognized; as the whole-grain study suggests, plant foods are apt to be more than the sum of their nutrient parts.
But the advantages of a plant-based diet probably go beyond whatever is in the plants: Because plant foods-with the exception of seeds-are less energy dense than most of the other things you might eat, by eating a plant-based diet you will likely consume fewer calories (which is itself protective against many chronic diseases). The seed exception suggests why it’s important to eat more leaves than seeds; though unrefined seeds, including whole grains and nuts, can be very nutritious, they’re high in calories, befitting their biological role as energy-storage devices. It’s only when we begin refining plant seeds or eating them to the exclusion of the rest of the plant that we get into trouble.
So what about eating meat? Unlike plants, which we can’t live without, we don’t need to eat meat-with the exception of vitamin B12, every nutrient found in meat can be obtained somewhere else. (And the tiny amount of B12 we need is not too hard to come by; it’s found in all animal foods and is produced by bacteria, so you obtain B12 from eating dirty or decaying or fermented produce.) But meat, which humans have been going to heroic lengths to obtain and have been relishing for a very long time, is nutritious food, supplying all the essential amino acids as well as many vitamins and minerals, and I haven’t found a compelling health reason to exclude it from the diet. (That’s not to say there aren’t good ethical or environmental reasons to do so.*)
That said, eating meat in the tremendous quantities we do (each American now consumes an average of two hundred pounds of meat a year) is probably not a good idea, especially when that meat comes from a highly industrialized food chain. Several studies point to the conclusion that the more meat there is in your diet-red meat especially-the greater your risk of heart disease and cancer. Yet studies of flexitarians suggest that small amounts of meat-less than one serving a day-don’t appear to increase one’s risk. Thomas Jefferson probably had the right idea when he recommended using meat more as a flavor principle than as a main course, treating it as a “condiment for the vegetables.”
What exactly it is in meat we need to worry about (the saturated fat? the type of iron? the carcinogens produced in curing and cooking it?) is unclear; the problem could be simply that eating lots of it pushes plants out of the diet. But eating too much industrial meat exposes us to more saturated fat, omega-6 fatty acids, growth hormones, and carcinogens than we probably want in our diet. Meat has both the advantages and disadvantages of being at the top of the food chain: It accu�
�mulates and concentrates many of the nutrients in the environment but also many of the toxins.
Meat offers a good proof of the proposition that the healthfulness of a food cannot be divorced from the health of the food chain that produced it-that the health of soil, plant, animal, and eater are all connected, for better or worse. Which suggests a special rule for people eating animal foods:
YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO. That is, the diet of the animals we eat has a bearing on the nutritional quality, and healthfulness, of the food itself, whether it is meat or milk or eggs. This should be self-evident, yet it is a truth routinely overlooked by the industrial food chain in its quest to produce vast quantities of cheap animal protein. That quest has changed the diet of most of our food animals from plants to seeds, because animals grow faster and produce more milk and eggs on a high-energy diet of grain. But some of our food animals, such as cows and sheep, are ruminants that evolved to eat grass; if they eat too many seeds they become sick, which is why grain-fed cattle have to be given antibiotics. Even animals that do well on grain, such as chickens and pigs, are much healthier when they have access to green plants, and so, it turns out, are their meat and eggs.
In Defense of Food Page 16
